Just need to vent a bit..... I know that this is not going into a bug report that can be left at the very bottom of a large list of bugs, but I just want to share my experience with Premiere while editing a feature film. To Adobe's credit, I can now have a full 2.5 hour edit in one sequence timeline without bringing Premiere to it's knees immediately (unlike 3 years ago when I last tackled such a large project with Premiere), but Premiere gets down on it's knees and then falls off the cliff pretty quickly even still.
I'm really curious how someone like Fincher and his team edited Gone Girl in Premiere CC. Truly. Premiere just doesn't seem like an application where stability is paramount. Sure, when editing single stock clips and short 10 minute projects, Premiere is relatively good.... aside from the 'unknown error' that often crops up at mysterious times and prevents an export, usually at 3am when trying to meet a deadline. But for large projects, Premiere is a gluttonous pig.
I'm running a fairly powerful Windows 10 system i7 5960X with 32gb of RAM.... nVidia GTX1070.... My film footage... 16tb of 5 and 6k Red Dragon clips resides on a local 27tb Raid 0 drive.
Yes, the project media is large in size and resolution.... but playback is not the problem here. It's Premiere's terrible parsing (loading/saving) of the media, extremely slow display of the timeline, and most troublesome.... bugs.... bugs.... everywhere.
Let's go through a few of the current issues I face:
1) Who was the genius that thought that loading multiple projects at the same time should be implemented with no other changes to the interface? Loading up 2 large projects into Premiere creates a cesspool of tabs, sequences, and windows in which it is difficult to tell which sequence belongs to which project. Yes, it's great that I can copy and paste from one project to the other.... a great feature. But why was no other thought put into making it clear which sequence belongs to which project. It's not even clear how one changes from saving one project to saving the other? Merely selecting the project's tab? Projects that are loaded into Premiere (when others have already been loaded) seem to inherit all the tabs and workspace settings of the previous project.... It gets very messy very quickly. Also, copying sequences from one project to another WITH IDENTICAL MEDIA causes Premiere to randomly add new identical copies of the media in your project list. This bug has existed in various forms for over 5 years. Premiere's management of media seems chaotic at best. It can't identify identical media.
2) Workspaces. I swear a new workspace that I've saved only seems to survive for a few sessions before loading of it opens nothing..... just a blank window. I'm forced to resort to one of the default workspaces that Premiere has built in. And Premiere can never remember which monitor to place things on. It keeps on moving the main Premiere window to a new monitor every time I load a workspace. I get so confused and frustrated with workspaces that I've stopped creating them.... I can't create a consistent layout that stays FOREVER.... so I've given up. This makes using Premiere a constant search for where one put the Media Browser, or Effects, or Effects Controls.... Not consistent and certainly not professional-grade.
3) Large project timeline manipulation.... Our film currently stands at 1 hour and 48 minutes..... just over 2000 cuts, with 1 to 8 layers of video (usually 1) and 5 to 24 layers of audio tracks. Premiere can't handle it. If I try to use the A tool to shift some of the footage, the screen freezes for a random number of seconds and eventually comes out of a coma with your media moved to a random location..... but you couldn't tell where exactly it's going to move it because the refresh rate is so slow. I'm not running this on a Pentium 4 with 1gb of RAM and an integrated graphics card. Computers can move 4000 little boxes of pixels at very fast rates.... It's just that the engineering of this software is so bloated and inefficient now that my fast computer has to go through a trillion hoops before it can decide what it has to move.... My work station over the years has multiplied in performance in leaps and bounds and Premiere is getting slower and slower with each Creative Cloud release! It's awful and Adobe needs to clean it's code house. I don't even see how they can keep this mountain of code from completely exploding with their extremely risky concurrent version development for the Creative Cloud. The age and inefficiency of the Premiere code base is showing. I don't think the Adobe engineers even have a chance of tracking down all the inefficiencies and bugs. Is it a million lines of C++ code now? Ludicrous. I pity the engineers that must deal with this behemoth.
4) A low level exception has occurred..... AERedFilter? This happens all the time when editing our project. It's just a matter of time. In order to avoid a fatal crash you need to save the project right away, shutdown, restart Premiere, and reload the project.... If you wait too long, you sometimes can't even save the project.... the project bar just hangs.... and even when it hangs, sometimes the project still does get saved.... it's all so random and unreliable.
5) Even shutting down Premiere and Media Encoder can be a challenge. Sometimes I need to load the task manager in Windows and 'End Task' for Premiere. It can't even shut down without crashing! Also, Premiere seems to spawn a thousands processing threads and if any of them remain alive in some zombie state, you can't restart Premiere. Clicking on the icon will do nothing. And there is rarely useful feedback when something goes wrong. Premiere just starts acting strange. Try running Premiere when your cache drive is full and you'll be sent on a wild goose chase. Premiere's code is not robust nor it's error 'reporting' informative.
6) Edit Clip in Adobe Audition..... Trying to do this on an audio clip from a multi-camera clip creates a zombie wav file that is not properly linked to the project. Quality assurance? What is that?
7) Markers.... I've recently had hundreds of markers for a sequence just suddenly disappear.... Magic. Too bad if you spent an hour placing them and edited for another hour before noticing that all the markers are gone.
All in all, I feel that the CC type of release schedule has been bad for Premiere's stability. I suspect the code base is so large and so fragile that perfectly functioning features get broken all the time in Adobe's mad rush to add new features.
The most important feature for any professional editor is reliability.... next is efficiency. Premiere is losing both. I moved from Sony Vegas to Premiere 5 years ago because Vegas was getting too buggy. Will I be forced to move to Avid soon?
Can any software developer choose reliability as it's most important feature or are we now permanently in a era where beta software is released to the public with an endless patching strategy to address the ever increasing bug list? Does Adobe really feel this is a long-term winning strategy? They do want Premiere around in 20 years, don't they? Maybe not.
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